Jack-O’-Lantern Bead Pin – Halloween Kid Craft

For many of us the approach of Halloween means a change in the seasons. This change often brings not only cooler weather, but often cold and wet weather. Weather that keeps kids indoors. All that time indoors often quickly turns to boredom. Bead pins are a great craft to keep kids busy and this fun jack-o’-lantern bead pin is perfect for the fall.

Jack-O’-Lantern Bead Pin

I have always been a huge fan of crafting. Even as a kid I was always asking my mom for ideas of crafts to make. I especially wanted to make things on cold bad weather days when I was cooped up inside. If only back then I had thought to put bead pin designs together like this jack-o’-lantern bead pin.

I actually did make my first bead pin back when I was a kid. My first one was an American flag bead pin. We made it as a craft when our 5th grade class had their school sleepover party. I had never thought to find ways to create other designs like it though.

It actually wasn’t that long ago that I started to think about other bead pin designs to make. I started thinking of types of designs, but one of the first that came to me was a jack-o’-lantern bead pin. I love how the pin turned out.

Supplies Needed for a Jack-O’-Lantern Bead Pin

How to Make a Jack-O’-Lantern Bead Pin

Making this Halloween bead pin is pretty easy. The hardest part was truly coming up with the design, and I’ve taken care of that step for you.

A few quick notes about the seed beads. These beads are quite small, so while I did design this project to be a kid craft it isn’t suitable for all ages. Also, I find that not all seed beads are created the same. Some of mine were bigger or smaller than others, so you might need to play around with the beads you’re using in order to get the design to line up correctly. I personally only had to switch a few beads out to make it look right though.

Creating the Bead Pins

For the creation process I’m going to discuss the pin going left to right, but the pin is a mirror image of itself with only the middle pin not having a double, so you can start at either side of the pin and get the same result.

To start you’ll want to create each of your 11 bead pins. You just open each pin and slide the beads on. When you’ve finished the pin clasp it closed and set it aside. It would be good to keep the pins in order as you set them aside. That’ll make it easier to put them on the main pin in the correct order later.

Assembling the Pin

Once all of the pins have been made it’s time to put them all onto the main safety pin. These final steps are going to require some adult help.

To start you’ll need to open up the coil of the main pin so you can slide all of the pins onto the closed side of the main safety pin. To do this take a butter knife, slide it into the coil, and gently pull on it to widen the coil. You don’t need to pull it too far open, just enough to maneuver the beaded pins through it.

Now it’s time to add the beaded pins. Going from pin 11 down start to add each beaded pin to the main pin. Do this by putting the hole of the beaded pin onto the opened part of the main pin. When you get to the coil you just opened you’re to continue to push the pin around it to get the beaded pin to the closed side of the main pin. It might be tricky at first, but it’ll get easier once if you’ve done it a few times.

Make sure that you position each beaded pin the same way when you add them to the main pin. Otherwise when you get it to the closed side your beaded pins will be facing in different directions. When I put mine together I always made the beads point left when I started to slide them on. You can see what I mean in the picture above.

Once all of the beaded pins have been added all you have left to do is to use the pliers to pinch the coil closed again. Make sure not to skip this step or your beaded pins will slide around and get stuck in the open coil.

This jack-o’-lantern bead pin really makes for a fun Halloween kid craft. It doesn’t take a lot of time to make, which can be great for short attention spans. It’ll be a great thing to keep kids busy on the next cold fall day when the “I’m boreds” start!